Death comes to all creatures, but human beings are unique in realizing that they will die. Hence, they are unique in being able to consider the possibility of life after death1. Ideas of an afterlife2 of one sort or another have been promulgated by all manner of cultures and religions. For ancient peoples, the afterlife3 was a realm of vastly diminished existence populated by shades, ghostly counterparts of bodies. Ancient Indians and Egyptians before 2000 BCE postulated a judgment after death. The Greeks had Hades; the Hebrews had Sheol. Far from being a matter of wish-fulfillment, an afterlife4, as pictured by ancient cultures, was not particularly desirable, just inevitable.

There are many conceptions of an afterlife5. To say that there is an afterlife6 (of any kind) is to say that biological death is not the permanent end of a human being’s existence: At least some people continue to exist and to have experiences after death. The idea of reincarnation is shared by a number of religions — including Hindu, Jaina, Buddhist. According to the idea of reincarnation, one is born over and over, and the circumstances of one’s life — even what sort of being one is — depend on one’s actions in the preceding life. Among philosophers, Plato had a view of reincarnation. Plato developed the idea of the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo: According to Plato, a person is an immaterial soul, temporarily imprisoned by a body. Death is liberation from the prison of the body; but after an interval of disembodied existence7, the soul is again imprisoned and is born again into this world. On Plato’s view, all this occurs in the natural course of things.

Author’s Conclusion

The doctrine of resurrection has not received as much philosophical attention as some other aspects of Christian theology (e.g., the problem of evil and the traditional arguments for the existence of God), but views on personal identity suggest intriguing possibilities for identifying conditions under which a premortem person can be identical to a postmortem person.

Only if a premortem and postmortem person can be one and the same individual is resurrection even a logical possibility.